Yellow Cross
by oftimeandspace
Summary: Seth didn't really choose to end up in some war in France. He didn't really choose a lot of things, actually. Seth-centric.


Title: Yellow Cross

Rating: PG-13 (violence and language)

Characters: Seth, Herrick, Mitchell, OCs

Summary:

A/N: I couldn't resist trying to make Seth a slightly less horrible character. The SBR was a small box respirator, a type of gas mask first issued to British troops in early 1916. It was carried in a bag and was worn high on the chest in the "alert" position while on the front lines. The gas attack probably isn't very accurate, but eh, artistic license. Can be considered a kind of companion piece to iThe Half Killed/i. Con. crit. and feedback is, as always, appreciated.

What saves Seth's life is the need to piss.

Later, when he has all the time in eternity to ponder his life, he will feel a particular mixture of embarrassment and resignation about this. It's a particularly apt penultimate act to the small and pathetic play of his life.

At the moment, Seth is not thinking of anything particularly philosophical or deep. What he is thinking, repeatedly, is i_Jesus fucking Christ/i_.

He went over the top against better judgement because he was tired of the damn trench, the sludge and damp of it, the smell of men living shoved in upon one another like so many rats in a sewer, all waiting quietly for the moment the officers ordered them over the top and towards the barbed wire. It was sometime near morning; far east a faint lighting of the horizon signaled the arrival of another April day. They'd been in the trenches for five days and, in a shining moment of sheer dumb luck, Seth decided, for the time, he was done with living like a dog.

He had just finished and was turning back towards his post when he heard the whine of incoming mortar shells from the direction of the German trenches, followed a few seconds later by a scream of "Gas! Incoming! Gas!"

Automatically Seth fumbles for his SBR bag, hands scrambling around empty air where it should be hanging about his neck. In his sleep deprived daze earlier he had removed it and tossed it on the ground that doubled as his sleeping area, cursing it and the fucking war while his mate Nettle moaned something about i_regulations, Jesus, the CO is gonna 'ave your 'ead for that/i_. A dense cloud of sickly yellow green smoke roils towards them, the early morning light almost making it glow.

_iJesus fucking Christ/i_, Seth thinks, and tries to dive back towards the safety of the trench and his gas mask, and finds that his legs refuse to obey his brain's screaming at them to i_move, move, holy fucking God, RUN/i_.

The cloud rolls across no man's land, slinking across the pitted and scorched earth, and pours into the front trench before Seth's eyes, obscuring the men in it from view. Someone screams, the sound muffled by their mask; the small part of Seth's mind that isn't obliterated by blank fear vaguely hopes Nettle got his mask on in time.

The smoke eddies about the trench, wisps moving closer towards him. He blinks, slowly, and watches silently as the cloud begins to drift towards the north, a slight change in wind pushing it away from him.

To the east the sky turns pink, the orange glow of the sun barely rising above the horizon. Seth wonders if this will be the last sunrise he sees, and then starts giggling hysterically.

He is still giggling when the medic labels him a 'W' and sends him down the line.

--

He writes long letters to his younger brother, great sheaves of papers filled with cramped writing sliding downwards across the page.

_iThey said there used to be unofficial truces to remove the wounded after the battles, but not anymore. Now we sit and wait afterwards while the wounded scream for their mums or for water or for whatever it is the fucking Germans scream about_./i

and in another he scribbles i_there's something horribly fascinating about watching a man caught in barbed wire decompose. God's greatest creation. The crows usually go for the eyes first/i_

He tears them into tiny bits of paper. The words are never i_right/i_.

In the end he usually sends some variant of i_I'm doing well/i_ and grins with something like happiness at the way the wounded men around him moan in agony.

--

Sitting in a damp cot in what passes for the front line's field hospital, Seth counts the number of ways he has seen men die, and thinks of his older brother when they were children, and how he always fucking followed him, even to this piece of shit country called France.

This is the basic problem of his life. He follows, because it is much easier than going alone. He hates himself, and how he never can quite live up to the image of himself he carries in his mind, but mostly he hates everyone else, because that too is easier.

He isn't a coward, precisely. He's just good at surviving.

--

His troop leader takes a bullet to the head on a Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning the new troop leader has ordered Seth back to the line, and so Seth goes, marching along obediently, back to his old regiment in the reserve trench.

A boy with sandy blond hair sneers, "have enough of hiding at your mum's?," having heard how Seth received his wound stripe. He is new, one of the placements shipped across the Channel in the past week. He has blue eyes like Seth's youngest brother.

Seth breaks his nose easily and grins with happiness at the way the boy crumples, blood dripping out of his cupped hands.

"Teach you to mess about with your fucking betters." Seth hisses, and kicks him in the ribs. The other men swear it was a fair fight, afterwards, and avoid Seth's eye when he is summoned to his troop leader's tent for a talking down.

His troop leader is a small man with ginger hair who grins like a house cat playing with a particularly interesting mouse when he first sees Seth. He speaks softly, telling Seth that it is the Germans' job to kill his men, not Seth's, and laughs like he has just told the greatest joke in the world, displaying neat white teeth.

Seth shivers with some strange mixture of jealousy and fear and thinks maybe this Herrick will be better than the last officer.

--

Nettle, he learns, suffocated, having been given a mask with a faulty filter.

Seth imagines Nettle smiling at him, an easy familiar grin, with eye sockets as deep and dark as the grave. Seth imagines a lot of things: the look on his brother's face when he died choking on his own blood in some shithole in Belgium, the silky skin of a woman's thigh warm beneath his palm, the taste of fresh eggs and bread with strawberry jam.

He imagines himself leaping out the trench, striding past the front lines into no man's land, to the shocked Germans and killing them one by one. The feel of their flesh against his grimy palms, slack pink mouths gaping open in fear as he towers above them.

--

Lt. Herrick leans against the back of the trench, coat spread out behind him, bracing himself against the packed dirt like he has all the time in the world to contemplate life. He sighs and glances out towards the enemy's lines, and then tilts his head down to watch as Seth check his rifle for damage.

"War is a special brand of idiocy."

Seth looks up, surprised that an officer would say that. Herrick grins at the look of confusion on Seth's face, and continues, "of course, we win this war, crush the i_deplorable/i_ enemy hordes, and then what? Ten, twenty years from now some new idiot offends someone else, and there's a whole new generation of boys madly chanting "i_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori/i_."

"What?" Seth asks, confused by the man's babble.

"Horace once wrote, 'how sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country'." Lt. Herrick explains, and gives Seth a grin that says i_fucking idiot/i_, though Seth is not quite sure if this directed at the aforementioned Horace or at him.

"I'd rather live for my country. Fuck all death has to do with being sweet. It's just being...dead. " Seth finishes lamely, rifle forgotten in his lap. He glances around, uneasy, to see that the rest of the men are busy with their entrenching tools around the bend in the trench, digging a new reconnaissance area.

Lt. Herrick squints down at him, suddenly tense, and Seth wonders just how he never noticed how dark the lieutenant's eyes are.

And then the other man opens his mouth and grins down at Seth, and he doesn't wonder about anything at all.

--

Men chase him with sticks, faceless and monstrous in old gas hoods. Seth runs and screams and screams, and jerks awake with a dying shriek on his lips. He has managed to climb out of the trench, though he does not remember it, and he aches everywhere.

Wincing, he sits up, to discover that it is night, and that he is lying next to a pile of battered corpses. His throat constricts with fear, and with something else; he watches a trickle of blood slowly congeal on a corpse's face, suddenly ravenous.

"Horrible, really." Lt. Herrick sighs, appearing out of the darkness to loom above him. "The shell shock must have finally gotten to you. Just dropped like a ton of rocks, right in the middle of the trench."

"What," Seth manages, around a mouth that feels like it is stuffed with cotton, "happened to me?"

"Oh, you died. Quite horribly, I might add." Herrick smiles benevolently down at him.

"Fuck off." Seth is quite sure his troop leader is completely insane. He stumbles to his feet, not particularly keen on hanging around to hear what else the man has to say. He is too tired and confused to add the "Sir," and it catches in his throat, making him cough and cringe into himself.

"You know, I could," Herrick muses, "but that wouldn't particularly change the fact that you're dead."

Seth ignores him, heading off vaguely in some direction, not quite sure where he is exactly. Herrick follows behind, quickly catching up and halting Seth's faltering steps. "Wouldn't go that way. That's back to the front."

Seth halts and looks at him, swaying on uneven ground. Herrick continues, "I've tired of this petty soldier business. Haven't you?' Seth feels his head nod once, jerkily, before he can make himself be still.

"Good." Herrick wraps a fatherly arm around his shoulders and leads him away from the front, voice calm and soothing as he explains about vampires and immortality and hunger.

--

The great thing about being a vampire, Seth quickly discovers, is how i_easy/i_ it is.


End file.
